Why my phone is silent during LCA talks

I don’t especially like Tasker’s interface, but setitng one’s phone to silent is nice enough to bust it out, so I thought I’d explain how I do this during linux.conf.au.

A bit of background: Tasker is an Android application (not free in either sense of the word) that does things to your phone when certain conditions (called contexts) are true. For example it could change the wallpaper (task) when you have unread text messages (context). I have, for example, Tasker tasks that turn my phone to silent between 10:30pm and 7:30am local time; and to run rsync backup (which copies the contents of my phone to my home server, ie backs it up) every time it is both on power and connected to my home wireless network.

Tasker somewhat trades between UI simplicity and power in favour of power (although even then I think there are better possible UIs for it). You can generally find specific apps that do individual Tasker-like things (for example, I would not be surprised if there was a ‘Silent at Night’ app), but Tasker lets you specify a wide variety of contexts and tasks.

First: the LCA calendar iCal is in my Google calendar, so it’s available to Tasker through its Calendar contexts. So that’s prior to setting this up.

The basic setup would be this:

  1. Go into Tasker.
  2. Add a Context (called eg ‘LCA activities’), select ‘State’, ‘App’, ‘Calendar Entry’.
  3. In Calendar Entry, go down to Calendar, press the search icon, select your LCA calendar.
  4. Press the tick.
  5. Now it will prompt you for the task, which is silencing your phone. Select ‘New Task’. Name the task (‘Silence’): it might be useful for other contexts!
  6. Press + to add an action. Select ‘Audio Settings’ and then ‘Silent Mode’. Turn ‘Mode’ to ‘On’. Leave ‘If’ alone. Press tick to approve the action and then tick to approve the task.

After this teeny (ahem) amount of work you now have a Tasker task that silences your phone during any event on the LCA calendar.

Fine print

My setup is a bit more complicated than this because I thought ‘wait, I want my phone to ring during meals’. This is a pain in the neck to do.

I added a second Context (long hold on the existing context), another Calendar Entry, also on the LCA calendar, but I also searched for location, selected ‘MCC Foyer’ (which is where the morning and afternoon teas are) and selected the Not tickbox, to make it a negative context. The total effect is that when there’s an event in the LCA calendar AND when there’s not an event in the LCA calendar that is in MCC Foyer, the task triggers. But that’s quite a bit nastier.

It can end up being easier to have a calendar that amounts to a ‘Do Not Disturb’ calendar, which isn’t ideal. Some people do something like “silence during anything in my work[/personal] calendar that’s marked busy”, etc etc, which would be longer lived than my LCA recipe. BUT at least my LCA recipe buys us silence for this conference!

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Why my phone is silent during LCA talks by Mary Gardiner is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

4 Replies to “Why my phone is silent during LCA talks”

  1. Your setup seems a littlemmore thorough than mine. I just used a network context, matching when I’m connected to the LCA wifi.

    Only issues with that have been still being silent during foyer breaks, and the fact the uni bar beer garden is just barely in range.

    1. I rejected that solution for some reason, I think due to my network issue: most people seem to report the wireless is great, but I have found connecting to it and getting bits to flow so difficult that I am tending to use eduroam.

  2. In my case, I have my phone silenced for the entire duration of the conference; I don’t want my phone ringing during tea or meals either, because I’d rather talk to the other attendees. (However, I can understand that the same would not hold true for conference organizers, who have the thankless job of making sure everything goes smoothly for everyone else. Thank you very much for that.)

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